After years of toil and fun, I've sold the trawler and bought a beautiful ketch - Arctic Rose

This blog is about the progress I made with Lady Jane and the start of a completely different lifestyle with Arctic Rose, and other fun stuff.

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Generator bearings

Dismantling the generator was pretty straightforward, as was getting the first bearing off.

The second bearing proved a little more troublesome, and as soon as I chipped a piece of cast iron off of the rotor I stopped trying to prise the bearing off with a piece of steel bar.

I did know better before I even started, but thought I'd just give it a try...

Anyway, after hauling it round to a few likely places to get the bearing removed using a proper puller, I gave that up as a waste of time. At one garage, the mechanic could not even comprehend what I was trying to do!

Back on board, I knocked up a very crude, but effective, puller with a few bzzts of the old welding machine.

If I ever need it, version 2 will have sliding jaws and a nut/bolt arrangement to ease a bearing off. This that you see was the quickest and easiest to craft up for the job in hand.

A few knocks with a hammer and the bearing popped off in no time.

I should have done that in the beginning.

By way of an update - I did take a picture of the plate on the side of the generator, but it did not come out at all well. I'll try again when I'm next on board.

Hi Tim, Ingenious puller! This comment probably belongs with the previous Generator post, but .... I think you might have a brushless alternator. In such a device the magnetic field for the rotor is produced by a stationary coil which somehow surrounds the rotor. Looking at the previous picture of your generator, we see a donut shaped structure in between two sections of stator windings. Are there 2 wires attached to that donut? And I guess there must be some large diodes hiding somewhere. And a regulator, as well. If all of the above are there then that's what you have.PS If you clean it well you can probably epoxy the fan bit back on. I guess the generator doesn't spin that fast.Regards,David